Huawei now slated to unveil the Kirin 990 SoC at IFA 2019
Huawei will reportedly launch the Kirin 990 during an official event at IFA 2019. This event will take place in early September 2019. This new premium mobile SoC is thought to power devices such as the Mate X and Mate 30 series. As it can also integrate the Balong 5000 modem, it could also deliver the 5G that all future flagships from this OEM are to have.
The Kirin 990 may also prove exceptional as it will result from a 7nm+ node, which may offer up to 10% improved performance compared to predecessors such as the 890. In other Huawei news, it has also launched a new, equally top-tier SoC for AI today (23 August, 2019) in Shenzhen, China. The Ascend 910 (which has a product name some may remember from a defunct line of former phones) is one of the Ascend-Max series of chipsets.
It is said to deliver 256 tera-FLOPS, albeit for half-precision floating point (FP16) operations, as well as 512 TeraOPS for INT8 integer-precision calculations. The Ascend 910's maximal power consumption is only 310W, however, which reduced by 10% compared to its predecessors. It was presented alongside the AI computing framework MindSpore. This combination is described as about 2x faster at training AI models compared to other "mainstream frameworks" when using TensorFlow.
MindSpore is also intended for use across all applications, from cloud to edge. Huawei claims it has "20% fewer lines of core code than leading frameworks on the market" when using the conventional networks for natural language processing. Therefore, the OEM believes it, as well as the Ascend 910, will be attractive to developers in the future.
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